"Because of their half-baked mistakes, We get ice cream, no cake, all lies, no truth, Is it fair to kill the youth?" [Prince, 7 June 1958 - 21 April 2016]

(D)ude: Man! Prince was a civil rights activist and had scheduled to meet with a fellow civil rights icon today, the fearless Harry Belafonte.

(M)an: Dude! I was reading Matthew Wilkening’s tribute to Prince, an article for “theboombox.com” entitled ‘It’s time for a new education’: the 10 best Prince political songs and was amazed at the breadth of every song the artist wrote and performed himself. Like 1980’s “Partyup” and 1985’s “Hello”—the first written around the time the Reagan Administration was seriously considering drafting our sons into the military to fight Iran for whatever purposes President Reagan had in mind to sacrifice our precious sons over diplomacy. Tragically, Reagan’s vice president George Herbert Walker Bush utilized the same strategy of war in Iraq when he ascended to become Bush 41. Add to that Bush 43’s reentry into war with Iraq and then Afghanistan and you’ve got every reason in the world, particularly the United States, to favor and become a Democratic Party member.

D: Man! We just want to jam, party up

(Party up, got to party up)

That army bag, such a double drag, party up

(Party up, got to, got to, got to party up)

Party, got to party down, baby

Revolutionary rock and roll

Goin' uptown, baby, ooh

How you gonna make me kill somebody I don't even know?

They got the draft, uh, uh I just laugh, party

(Party up, got to party up)

M: Dude! Because of their half-baked mistakes

We get ice cream, no cake, all lies, no truth

Is it fair to kill the youth?

Party up

Got to party up, yeah

D: Man! You gonna have to fight your own damn war (party up, got to party up)

'Cause we don't wanna fight no more (party up, got to party up)

M: Dude! April 22, 1971 was forty-five-years ago this past Friday! Do you know what happened on that day 45 years ago? Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s successor John Kerry addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by then-Senator James William Fulbright of Arkansas. A Southern Democrat segregationist and later mentor of Bill Clinton’s, Senator Fulbright became an opponent to American warfare and even wrote a severe account of American foreign policy in his 1966 book The Arrogance of Power.

D: Man! So what happened during the matchup between the spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Reserve Lieutenant John Kerry, and Senator Fulbright?

M: Dude! The Vietnam War would end, but the horrors detailed in the accounts by returning soldiers, which the Vietnam Veterans Against the War recorded, would play out in the 1979 through 1989 Afghanistan War that the Soviets entered into, the piercingly raw record of the accounts of returning Soviet soldiers and their families being made by Svetlana Alexievich, a female journalist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year.

D: Man! Is Svetlana Alexievich published in the United States?

M: Dude! Eyewitness accounts of the soldiers and families grieving the Afghanistan War have been on the record in Svetlana Alexievich’s book Zinky Boys, available since its original publication in 1989. But the book was rereleased recently, following Alexievich’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sadly, like Prince grieves in his 1985 song “Hello,” the Soviet survivors of the Afghanistan War recount reading American literature masters like Mark Twain to Alexievich, which made me think about why community centers are boarded up or closed down in the most vulnerable, violent neighborhoods in the United States.

D: Man! Do you remember when Baltimore, Maryland was under siege by rioters? Do you remember how the two most infamous rival gangs came together with counsel from the Nation of Islam? The Bloods and the Crips?

M: Dude! Maybe the British need to be reading our left-wingers as we read their left-wingers like the Independent?

D: Man! That would be a way of calming the “Brexit” movement by the England’s Conservative Party, the same one that Margaret Thatcher led when Reagan was president and Herbert Walker Bush was vice president!

M: Dude! I agree! If the Bloods and the Crips can come together in solidarity to “stop killing one another and rebuild the community” then every one of us can do our part to ensure resources for our most vulnerable populations.

D: Man! The Neocons in the United States of America bring minority and poor children onto the streets by holding off on financing solutions inside the United States Congress. America’s Conservatives deregulate and defund government programs and subsidies, opting towards a general unrest and unease right before declaring a state of emergency through terrorism and warfare.

M: Dude! We need to go after the gun distributors, not necessarily the manufacturers. This means that the government cooperate not with the National Rifle Association, but the individual manufacturers of guns who are apart from the NRA. The Neocons want to build walls to isolate the United States, but they never mention the fact that the underground tunnels that facilitate illegal activities need to be targeted and destroyed.

D: Man! The underground tunnels beneath the superficial walls of isolationism are where the Neocons do their underhanded businesses that provide our disenfranchised children with pathways to guns and drugs.

M: Dude! We're against hungry children

Our record stands tall

There's just as much hunger here at home

We'll do what we can if y'all try and understand

A flower that has water will grow

And the child misunderstood will go

Hello

Hello

Hello

Hello

Everybody, we're against hungry children

Our record stands tall

There's just as much hunger here at home

We'll do what we can if y'all try and understand

A flower that has water will grow

And the child misunderstood will go

Our record stands tall, you know

Give us time and love will show

D: Man! Wow! Prince was such a prodigious poet!  

M: Dude! He was ahead of the times and always in the forefront of everlasting tomorrows! When he spelled “SLAVE” onto his right cheek after the one-hundred-million-dollar deal with Warner Bros. was brokered, he was making a statement about the downside of American Capitalism and Western Society being considered the gold standard around the world. Prince personally experienced the downfall of American Capitalism and Western Society from the start of his career, choosing to fight for civil liberties for all and, interestingly, singing this about his own bodyguards in 1985’s “Hello,”
You call 'em bodyguards but I call 'em my friends

I guess I'm used to havin' 'em around

D: Man! Did you see Donald Trump’s crumpled suit lapel on the Today Show with Matt Lauer the other day? His wife and children were sitting to his right on barstools and you could visibly see the crease in Donald Trump’s suit lapel. Clearly, the guy is a staunch and stingy Republican. The last time he probably tipped a groundskeeper was when he was in the womb and his mother paid a
housekeeper out of a sudden biblical fear for the family’s past, present, and foreseeable discourtesies.

M: Dude! American voters are beginning to realize what Prince and Harry Belafonte talked about privately, that capitalism without a competitive marketplace on a global scale leads to the manufactured warfare and poverty we see in our lives. We are in the 21^st century! The Koch Brothers and their multibillionaire rivals are equivalents to Stalin and Lenin! The systems of communism and capitalism are theoretically brilliant and beautiful, but if either one falls into the hands of doctrinaires and demagogues, like the Republican Party and its financiers the Koch Brothers et al, then the world is destined for death and destruction.

D: Man! That’s why American Voters need to Feel the Bern and VOTE! That’s the only way to ensure a world without warfare and poverty, manufactured from the top down, never the bottom up. American Voters need to Feel the Bern and VOTE for a global reality of much healthier mixed economies and our veterans and military sons and daughters in the United States getting a fair chance at rebuilding their lives after they have served and returned home.

M: Dude! If our sons and daughters in fatigues were given the opportunity, they would build competitive marketplaces around the world and be successful agents of democratic transitioning for all our global friends and foes alike! Democracy and peace can only spread by American Voters eliminating capital punishment at home and abroad in favor of rehabilitation.

D: Man! When warfare and poverty are manufactured from the bottom up, the Republican Party and its financiers label those living in these manufactured hells as irresponsible “super predators” if male and undeserving welfare “queens” if female.

M: Dude! Feel the Bern! The Republican Party creates those hells which appear to be manufactured from the bottom up! The Republicans close down community centers and proceed with introducing the displaced to guns and drugs. The violence and addiction conundrums that follow cripples all our family systems and society.

D: Man! Feel the Bern! Stand up with Bernie and kick into motion an advanced civilization!